Everyone at the FSU was relieved to hear that evangelical street preacher and FSU member Hatun Tash is alive and well, following reports that she had been missing for five weeks in the lead-up to Christmas (Christian Today). Having launched an investigation, the Met Police subsequently confirmed that Hatun, who regularly reads from the Bible and debates Islam and the Qur’an at Speakers’ Corner, is “no longer being treated as a missing person”.
There was good reason to be worried about Hatun, not least because concerns for her welfare first arose just days after an Islamic terrorist was sentenced to a minimum of 16 years in prison (recently increased to a minimum of 24 years) for plotting to kill her (Sky News).
Sadly, there are many others not currently at His Majesty’s pleasure who would happily do her harm if they could.
Over the past few years, Hatun, an ex-Muslim convert to Christianity, has regularly been targeted at Speakers’ Corner, having been repeatedly punched, stabbed, slashed, spat at and knocked unconscious by Islamists, apparently for the ‘crime’ of refusing to be cowed and continuing to profess her faith.
In a shameful miscarriage of justice back in 2022, Hatun was arrested in Hyde Park by the Met Police after being robbed – yes, you read that correctly – and taken into custody for 24 hours where, among other things, she was strip searched.
She was later told by the police that the reason she had been arrested was because of her “offensive” t-shirt – it reproduced one of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
The FSU wrote to the Met to complain about this arrest and demanded an apology, which she eventually received – thanks to top-drawer legal representation from the Christian Legal Centre she also received £10,000 in damages (Times).
That was of course the right outcome.
But it’s difficult to imagine the Islamist ‘class of 2022’ weren’t emboldened by the experience of seeing a diminutive apostate whom they’d just robbed getting arrested and forcibly detained by a large number of police officers while they themselves remained free to chant “Allahu Akbar” and engage in further attempts to assault her as she was being led away.
In an interview with the Spectator’s Tom Goodenough this week, Hatun said that although she plans to return to Speakers’ Corner in the future, she will stay away for the time being, mostly out of concern for the safety of others. “If someone turns up with chemicals, they might harm someone else,” she explained, quietly exposing the de facto blasphemy code now in operation across large swathes of the country as she did so.
“Why continue to speak out and place yourself at risk?” Tom asks at one point. “I’m not brave,” she responds. “But you’ve got to make a choice. Do you want to deal with it or just keep quiet, and shut down? Once they know they have (silenced you), they can stop you.”
An extraordinarily brave woman. Everyone at the FSU stands in solidarity with Hatun.
